


Echoes

by Quecksilver_Eyes



Series: Narnia Musings [31]
Category: Chronicles of Narnia (Movies), Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: F/F, Post-Book: The Last Battle (Narnia), The Problem of Susan, in which susan's eldest looks at the world and herself and draws her conclusions, on siblings one never knew, on sleepless nights and generational homesickness for a place long dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-31
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-07-28 03:47:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20057515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quecksilver_Eyes/pseuds/Quecksilver_Eyes
Summary: Sometimes, at night, when the tap drips a slow rhythm against the sink, when all the lights are out and I feel my way through the hallway to the bathroom and back, I think of my mother and all the stories she wove all around us when we were still small enough to look at the shadows cast against our bedroom walls and see a thief, a unicorn, a lion, a queen and her siblings.or:on sleeplessness and how it makes us all feel like we're children again, wide eyed and hollow teethed and aching for things to know.





	Echoes

Sometimes, at night, when the tap drips a slow rhythm against the sink, when all the lights are out and I feel my way through the hallway to the bathroom and back, I think of my mother and all the stories she wove all around us when we were still small enough to look at the shadows cast against our bedroom walls and see a thief, a unicorn, a lion, a queen and her siblings. I think of my mother and how sometimes, I look at her and think _I wish the world had been kinder to you, I wish you could still be golden eyed and iron limbed, I wish your hair was still to your ankles and as dark as a black birch’s bark._ Sometimes I look at her and hear another’s name when she calls me. I think of my mother and the tilt to her language that’s not quite English.

Sometimes I look at her and wonder if she, like us, who see shadows on a wall and cracks in the floors that don’t look like cracks at all, looks at us and our laughing mouths, our scraped knees and our pouting lips, and sees echoes of a world long fallen. I wonder, mother, do I look like the child you lost? The one who grew up to spit your name to the ground as if it was something dirty - something poisonous perhaps, as if, were she to keep it nestled behind her lips, it would numb her tongue and rot her teeth from the roots up. Did she have eyes like mine? Do we share birth marks, quirks? Was she freckled, like you used to be, before you were pushed back through a wardrobe, a tree?

When I was a small child, my mother called me by her name as much as she used my own, as if she’d looked at me and couldn’t untangle all that I am from all that my sister was, before she shrunk back into a child’s body, before there was a stag, or a hunt.

Are we similar, mother? Do we share a smile, do we have the same chipped tooth, the same way of chewing our bottom lip when we’re thinking? I wonder, mother, at which point I stopped being the echo and started being the call. My seventh birthday, perhaps, when I stood on the kitchen table and you taught me how to waltz? Maybe it was when you found me, in my room, with my heart in my throat for the first time?

All I know is this: there is an ache in my bones I have yet to sate, there is a sister, a brother I will never know - they grew up a world and centuries away, with only a portrait and stories to remember our mother by. There was once a statue queen, draped in jewellery, and she was gentle and _oh_, so beautiful. Vain, too, with her hands in her hair and on the finest fabrics, with her eyes on new prosthetics, each more intricate than the last.

Here’s a memory for your consideration:

The night before my seventh birthday, I snuck into the kitchen, with eyes big enough to swallow the world whole and still leave room for more. The light was switched off, but one of my parents - maybe it was mom, maybe it was mother - had lit a lamp and put it on the cupboard. It flickered softly and illuminated both of them in their nightgowns. Mother was kneading dough, her hands full of flour, her hair open and loose, and her face crinkled where she would later develop her wrinkles - smile lines around the mouth, crow’s feet, the fine lines on her forehead - and mom had her arms slung around her waist and was singing softly, her lips against my mother’s ear, swaying her gently.

Sometimes, at night, as I creep like a stranger through my own flat, I feel like I’m almost seven years old again, spying on a moment not meant for my eyes, when my mother’s hair was down and flour dusted and she curled into my mom’s arms. Sometimes, at night, I am a child again, and I believe in all the stories written in my mother’s eyes.


End file.
